Saturday, February 15, 2014

Promo Blitz: Killing Bliss

Killing Bliss - PROMO
Blitz

By E C Sheedy

Date Published: June 2013

Romantic Suspense

One night. Two bullets. Three
runaways.

Addy Michaels, living her careful life on
a forgotten back road, thinks she's safe--that her past and its
corpses are long buried. Surely after fifteen years the cops have
quit looking for the street kids believed to have kidnapped a baby
and killed their prostitute foster mother, Belle Bliss.

Addy couldn't be more wrong.

A cold case. Hot again, when the missing
child's grandmother hires renowned profiler Cade Harding to find her
grandson. Cade tracks Addy to her safe haven in a remote area of
Washington state. Their attraction to each other is immediate,
dangerous, and badly timed because...

Cade isn't alone.

A twisted killer, faceless and
unknowable, follows in Cade's footsteps--on the hunt for anyone who
can tell the truth about killing Bliss.

All roads lead to Addy.

EXCERPT

Cade looked at Stan and Susan, two aging
lovers—and he'd decided they were definitely lovers. Susan's eyes
were wide, expectant. Stan's were judgmental and pissed
off.

Cade turned to Susan, genuinely puzzled.
"Why now?" he asked. "After all these years, why ask
me to investigate now?"

"Mainly because I didn't know, until
your mother's funeral, that you could help. It was your wife who told
me what you did, how successful you were. She was very proud of you,
you know." She paused. "As for your mother? Whenever I
asked about you, she said very little, other than you'd 'taken off
and left her alone, just like your father."

Cade might have protested, except for the
glint of understanding in Susan's eyes, an understanding that no
doubt came from years of her lending his mother money. He didn't
bother defending himself, say how he'd kept in touch with his mother
until she died and sent a regular monthly check. His
business.

"That it?" he asked, wanting to
end the conversation.

"No. The big reason is Frank Bliss
is being paroled after serving seven years for
manslaughter."

Stan interjected. "Go back a bit,
Susie."

She pursed her lips. "A few months
after the murder, I met with Frank Bliss. I'd hoped to learn
something the police hadn't—stupid, I know—but..." She took
a few steps, then turned back to face him, her expression defiant.
"Ever since, I've felt that boy knew more than he'd
told."

"You 'felt'?" Even though
Cade's career as a profiler centered on building a whole loaf from
discarded chaff, he'd learned to distrust the I felt phrase—so
often too close to its sister phrase, I wish, to be
worthwhile.

"I figured you'd glom on to that
word, but regardless, I'll stand by it. Frank Bliss was either lying
or not telling everything he knew."

"If you consider his mother was
brutally murdered—literally before his eyes—why would he lie?
What do you think he'd gain from it?"

"I have no idea," she said.
"But ever since the murder, Frank Bliss has been in jail more
than he's been out. I suspect he lies for all kinds of
reasons."

"And his brother?"

Stan answered. "Dead. Knifed in an
alley after a fight in some club. About three years after the
murder."

"Unlucky family," Cade said. "A
good psychologist might say it was his mother's murder that turned
Frank bad in the first place."

"He'd be wrong," Susan said,
"because Frank didn't like his mother."

"He told you that?"

"He didn't have to. It was in his
face, in his eyes. I think he was happy she was dead."

"Even if you're right, it doesn't
prove—"

She stopped him with a raised hand, her
eyes coal hard and direct. "If he didn't care about his mother,
he certainly wouldn't care about a sixteen-month-old baby. Whatever
his reasons, I think he lied." She waved her hand in a
frustrated action, her voice rose. "Maybe he killed his mother,
maybe the lies were to protect himself, or his kid
brother—"

"That's a lot of maybes, Susan."
Cade said quietly. "Besides, you said the police checked Brett's
alibi."

"They could be wrong. It wouldn't be
the first time."

The room went quiet, and Stan arched a
brow and looked at Cade, his expression bordering on sympathetic.
"Susie hasn't let this case go since she found out about Josh.
She's not about to stop now," he said.

Maybe not, but Cade knew they'd stepped
hip deep into the realm of conjecture and magical thinking on a
murder that occurred fifteen years ago. "It's a waste of time.
Mine and yours," Cade said. He hadn't left WSU to get mired in
someone else's problem, someone else's grief—or to work a case with
a serious case of freezer burn. He'd walked this walk before.
Swampland in a fog. "I'm sorry," he said again, more firmly
this time. "I can't help you."

Again the room fell to silence, broken
finally by Susan's heavy sigh.

"I didn't want to do this," she
said. "But you leave me no choice." She met his eyes, her
gaze unwavering. "You do this for me, Cade, and I'll forget what
your mother owed me, which over the years came to over sixty-five
thousand dollars."

She might as well have hit him in the gut
with a two-by-four. His breath swooshed out, then he shook his head,
muttered, "Son-of-a-bitch."

Addy picked up her paint gear,
straightened, and let her gaze drift over Star lake. Ruffled by the
wind, it was a blanket of rippling diamonds in the afternoon sun. She
swiveled, her gaze feasting on the tiny property: the cabins, ten of
them sporting new paint jobs and looking proud and pretty, the fresh
gravel she'd laid in the driveway, and the new sign in amusing
fifties-style lettering she'd had done for over the office door. All
of it her work, her dream, her safety net.

She headed for the maintenance shed, but
hadn't taken more than three steps before she heard a car turn off
the highway and scrunch its way along her new gravel.

She looked over her shoulder to see a
Cherokee—maybe three or four years old—pull up to the office
steps. A man and a dog—probably the same age as the truck—got
out. Knowing Toby would handle them, Addy continued on to the shed
and stowed her supplies neatly on the shelves.

The man was coming out of the office as
she approached. The big yellow dog, who'd been sitting outside the
door, got up, wagging its tail and wiggling its rear end as if he'd
been abandoned for a month rather than the few minutes it had taken
for his owner to check in.

There were three steps up to the office
door. From the bottom one, she said, "Friendly?" And nodded
at the dog.

"Does he have a name?" She ran
a hand along the silky fur on his back. She really should get a
dog... if she stayed.

"Redge." He shifted his gaze
from the dog and met hers. "What about you?"

Her nerves jangled, and she tucked her
hands in the pockets of her overalls. "Me?" she said,
sounding confused and stupid and knowing she was neither.

"Name. Do you have one?"

She pulled her hands from her pockets,
stuck one out straight as a lance, and said, "Addy Michaels. I'm
the owner of Star Lake."

She wasn't sure, but she thought she saw
him blink a couple of times, his eyes sharpen. He definitely
hesitated before taking her hand, then smiled as if he was obliged
to, kind of cool and polite. "Addy. I'm Cade Harding. Nice to
meet you."

"Likewise. I take it you'll be
staying with us?" She dropped to one knee to pet the dog, and
get out from under his eyes, which suddenly seemed a bit too
intense.

"A couple of days at least." He
hesitated. "Maybe more."

She got to her feet, risked looking up at
him. He resembled Gus a little, or how she imagined Gus would look
with a few years on him. Dark hair, dark eyes, a bit of stubble
around the chin, body on the lean side. Gus's face would be harder
though, colder, not so... bookish or calm. And Gus’s eyes were a
strange amber brown, nothing at all like Cade Harding's, which were a
green color that reminded Addy of cedar boughs. "You sound like
a man without a destination."

He didn't smile this time, but he did
tilt his head a bit. Her nerves skittered again when his gaze fixed
on her. “As destinations go this will do just fine.”

About the
Author:

EC Sheedy

EC Sheedy lives and writes on Vancouver
Island in British Columbia. With the ocean a few steps from her door
and Zuke, a 110 pound Rhodesian Ridgeback, sleeping on the sofa in
her office, she considers herself one very lucky writer. But her real
luck is being married to Tim, her first and final husband.

EC writes both contemporary romance and
romantic suspense, the latter because sometimes a nasty and conniving
villain pops into my head and she just has to get him
out.